Friday, November 11, 2011

Malaria Vaccine Possible By 2015

AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues.
A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would
cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
—Jared Diamond

We would have wished that we could wipe it out, but I
think this is going to contribute to the control of malaria
rather than wiping it out. —Tsiri Agbenyega, a principal
investigator in the RTS.S trials in Ghana,said about the trial vaccine

There were many ups and downs and moments over the years when we thought
can we do it? But today I feel fabulous. This is a dream of any
scientist —to see your life's work actually translated into a medicine
that can have this great impact on peoples' lives. How lucky am I?

Female Anopheles albimanus mosquito feeds on a human host, becoming engorged with
blood. Anopheles adults also generally feed
in the evening, or early morning when it is still dark. This species is a
vector of malaria, predominantly in Central America.Photo Credit: James Gathany, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2005.Source: Wikipedia

There is currently no effective vaccine against malaria, a parasite that kills hundreds of thousands of children each year. But there is promising results in clinical trials, and a vaccine (called RTS.S) might be commercially available by 2015 (See here and here). Even so, this vaccine might not become as effective as other long-standing vaccines like the ones to prevent polio or measles, mumps and rubella. The chief reason is that malaria is caused by a parasite and not a virus.

"Malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium, which is transmitted via the bites of infected mosquitoes," explains the World Heath Organization. There are four species of the Plasmodium, with Plasmodium falciparum "the most widespread and dangerous," says a science site dedicated to microbiology. Alphonse Laveran, a French army surgeon, was the first to notice parasites in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria in 1880. For his work, Dr. Laveran was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1907.

Even so, malaria persists in all about 100 countries in the world, chiefly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the greatest group at risk are children under the age of five. Effective treatment is available with the use of antimalarial drugs, including the use of artemisinin, which are called artemisinin-combination therapies, or ACTs.

Even so, a vaccine will decrease malaria deaths, particularly when used in conjunction with current practices, such as the use of bed nets and controlling the vegetation around waterways where female malaria-carrying mosquitoes breed—all of which are from the genus Anopheles (e.g., see here). Note it is only female mosquitoes that transmit malaria, since males do not bite humans and feed only on the juices of plants.

It`s not all bad news in regions where malaria has long been prevalent, notably Africa. Methods of eradication and vector control have already proven somewhat successful. In a May 2011 article in Time magazine,"Progress Against Malaria in Africa Is Real but Fragile,"
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia; and Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, write:

More welcome news: global deaths from malaria have fallen from nearly
a million a year in 2000 to 781,000 in 2009. But even while we mark
what may be a turning point in our effort to eradicate the disease, we
cannot overestimate our progress. It is fragile.

Malaria continues to exact a great toll, killing three-quarters of a
million people a year, more than 90% in Africa, which accounts for about
one in six child deaths. The consequences of losing our focus now would
be deadly. Mosquito bed nets last about three years, and a failure to
replace the more than 300 million nets blanketing Africa over the coming
three years could lead to resurgent malaria illness and deaths.

That makes the availability of a vaccine more pressing, more urgent. If all goes well, GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company responsible for the malaria drug (RTS.S), says the vaccine
could reach the market in 2015.

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;